Dissertation Defense: Peiyuan Mao, Yale University, “Blazar Demographics: Intrinsic Properties of Jet-Dominated Active Galactic Nuclei”

Blazars with their Doppler-boosted relativistic jets are perfect laboratories to study jet physics and provide crucial insights into jet mechanism, black hole spin, and growth history of the host galaxy. However, the blazar samples we observe are highly biased subsets of the true population because of the complicated shape of their spectral energy distributions. Thus to infer the intrinsic properties of blazars we have to extrapolate from the biased samples — and there are two opposing theories about the correct way to do this extrapolation: one in which the synchrotron-radiating electron energies are linked to the total jet power, the other in which they are independent. My dissertation is a thorough investigation of the intrinsic properties of blazars, from their spectral energy distributions to their luminosity functions to their cosmic evolution.